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Fantastic post - thanks so much! I had no idea about the Iranian equation or the three ratios.

Two comments...

1. You translated atherosclerotic as "athero" (artery) "sclerotic" (hardening). According to Taber&#39;s medical dictionary, "athero" comes from the Greek for gruel or porridge, and the prefix now generally refers to fatty plaques. Porridge-filled arteries is a lovely image, isn&#39;t it?

2. In reference our to our body repairing artery walls, you said "Normally, it will repair them with saturated fat and protein, which is what cell walls [membranes ;-) ] are made of, but if we&#39;re not eating those things, the body can&#39;t produce them out of thin air, so it sends cholesterol in as a stopgap measure." You seem to imply that we must get dietary SFAs and amino acids. But our livers and adipocytes are actually pretty good at making SFAs - that&#39;s how we store excess carbohydrates as fat.

Thanks for a good primer - I&#39;m definitely filing this away for future reference!

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Follow up to the how to improve your HDL:

I asked because I&#39;ve gotten a friend around to doing PB for better than 6 months but he still hasn&#39;t been able to boost his HDL number. I don&#39;t know what his specific numbers are just that he was interested in knowing if there was anything he could do to get a better number, so, since we were talking about cholesterol anyways I figured I&#39;d ask a general question and see what people said. Sorry I didn&#39;t give the backstory the first time around.

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Thanks for this Griff, I feel much better informed now!

My closest friend is a final year medical student, who is convinced that I am going to kill myself by eating huge amounts of saturated fat, some of it from drinking lots of cream. He has tried persuading me that I will develop atherosclerosis if I don&#39;t slow down on the cream soon (which I intend to as soon as I reach my weight goal, mostly to reduce lactose intake.)

I&#39;ve promised those around me that I will have a blood panel done in a few months, to reassure them that I&#39;m still healthy despite my fat intake, and now I feel a bit more prepared for when that time comes.

Apparently I suck at life, so I'm crowd-sourcing my decisions, and sharing what I learn.